Real Life Food Blogging – Week 6

Welcome to week 6 of me sharing what it is like in the first few months of food blogging. I wanted to share first hand what it is like so that you can see whether food blogging is for you or not.

Just like owning a restaurant there is a lot of hard work to be done and I believe people assume that because you work from home that there is not the same amount of hard work. But in reality there is just as much work to do and just because you are sat on your backside for most of it, doesn’t mean you’ve worked less than that friend that owns a shop.

Today for example (after a mountain of emails) I have maintained my social media, made sure my blog posts have gone up, checked my stats, written a couple of blog posts and now I am finally writing the introduction for this and explaining what the last week has been like!!!!

Of course at the same time as all that I have been watching the Die Hard movies, watching my daughter play with our puppy and eat way too much chocolate for a Monday morning.

Because it would be wrong if food blogging didn’t have at least a few perks!!!!

Finally finished the last of Decembers Food Blogging

It feels amazing to say this. I am finally up to date and can concentrate on January’s posts and working on other promotional plans.

After week 5 all I had left was three posts, plus two more to edit but they were hard work posts and I can now say they are done and move onto some others.

We have started January’s Posts

I am all for forward planning and having a content calendar on my blog. I like to plan my content in advance and then when I have new and exciting content ideas I will then add it to the content calendar and then I won’t forget.

As I write this to you today we are already nearly halfway through December and you want to write as far ahead as you can. This is because things come up and you then know that if you miss a planned day blogging, then it is not the end of the world.

I have written the following this week:

10 recipe posts – these are covering the first 10 days of January as we are planning on doing a soup feature with it being the month of dieting and cold weather.

5 Cooking tips posts – These are really easy and fast to write as I am going from personal experience rather than having to do any research and it feels really good to get these done now.

Started the review posts – I have also started the review posts for the marketplace. These go out every Friday and I have worked my way through the first three. This means I don’t need to produce the next one until the 22nd January. I could have finished January but because I have new products coming in it would be unfair to make product owners wait until February until I review it.

And that is all the advanced blogging I have managed. But to say that I have done 18 blog posts already for January is amazing.

We have been testing our social media

Social media is all about trial and error. One thing works on one channel but doesn’t on another. We are having excellent success with getting on a lot of social media groups and we want to continue with this. The recipe ones on Facebook & Pinterest both do very well and I am getting a good amount of general interaction and plenty of retweets.

It is a case (for us) and for many other bloggers to rinse and repeat and just carrying on getting yourself out there.

We have also now had three posts that have linked out to other bloggers and this has led to some social sharing and we have another two similar posts to go out between December and January.

I am officially on Instagram

Otherwise known as working your arse off…..loading lots of blog post images and linking to them, building up your following, liking related things and general hard work.

Because I am about six weeks behind as far as content is concerned I am loading up blog posts at the rate of five per day. I then hope to be caught up by the end of next week. But it is a big commitment to make with all these posts, so I will see how I feel for how much of it I end up doing.

Though, I am starting to think that I am either blogging or on social media at the moment and this is taking over my life!!!!

What are we doing next week?

I am carrying on with some of January’s posts. The reason for this is because I have worked really hard in 2015 and I want to have some time off over Christmas. I know I will still have my social media and the sale of some of my other sites, but this would then take the heat off this.

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One of my big things was putting together a sales funnel for those that want to get into food blogging. I have decided to put this off until January just because we have so much on and wouldn’t have the time to market it until then anyway.

This coming week we are hoping to get to grips with our Podcast. Podcasts are one of the best sources of traffic and we want to get involved with this as soon as possible.

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We’re The Milners

Hello we’re the Milners and we run RecipeThis.com from our country cottage in Southern Portugal. The Milners is made up of husband and wife duo Dominic & Samantha along with their kids Kyle, Sofia & Jorge. They love cooking with local Mediterranean ingredients and are addicted to chocolate. If they could cook for the rest of their lives with just kitchen gadgets then they would!.

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